Announcing Aurora EOS

by Kyle Samani

Today I’m very excited to unveil a secret project that some people inside of Multicoin have been working on for a few months: Aurora EOS.

Aurora EOS is an independent company that will be a block producer for the EOS blockchain. Myles Snider, who was our first research analyst at Multicoin, will step up to serve as Aurora EOS’s CEO. While Myles will remain a strategic advisor to Multicoin, he has transitioned full-time to Aurora to dedicate his focus exclusively to serving the EOS community. Tushar and I will sit on Aurora’s board of directors, allowing the two of us to focus on managing Multicoin’s investments.

Aurora will publish a new weekly EOS newsletter called Aurora EOS Weekly Update, along with opinionated essays in a similar spirit to those featured on the Multicoin’s blog. I highly recommend that you subscribe. Voter education and engagement is arguably the single most important problem worth focusing on in EOS right now, and Aurora will contribute substantially in this regard.

Our EOS position has been a controversial one— many of our peers have not yet fully grasped the significance of the tradeoffs that EOS has made, nor the value that it unlocks for developers building consumer applications. Additionally, other than those who live and breathe in the EOS ecosystem, most crypto generalists are too quick to write off EOS as just another smart contract platform.

If you believe this, then you should subscribe to Aurora’s mailing list to learn about how the EOS ecosystem is evolving and what developments lie ahead.

Why Aurora EOS?

The role of crypto investors is evolving—rapidly. It’s not enough to simply be a pure custodian or asset manager any more. Crypto-native managers also bear the responsibility of ushering nascent markets to stability—by way of investment, governance, and active participation.

EOS is by far the largest blockchain with meaningful on-chain governance components. It also mandates the highest levels of technical capability, and requires the most active governance (Myles touches on this in the Hello World post).

We determined that if we were going to do this at all, we needed to do so in such a way that would exceed the market’s expectations of what block producers can and should be. And the only way to do that is to create a dedicated entity with an autonomous CEO who can build a company with strategic purpose and focus.

As an independent company, Aurora is better equipped to excel at its mission: to drive long-term platform adoption by cultivating an engaged and informed EOS community. And because Tushar and I will serve on Aurora’s board, we’ll be able to learn from Aurora’s experiences through our close relationship with Myles and synthesize those learnings as we participate in the governance of other networks.

We plan to live up to the potential of what every crypto-native investor can and should be. We are already participating in Livepeer mining will be running a transcoding node soon. We were recently elected to run an Authority Node in the Factom ecosystem. In the the next 12 months, we expect to be actively contributing to network validation and governance in over a dozen crypto networks.

Each network will be unique. And we will learn by participating in each one. We will synthesize those learnings so that we can be a better ecosystem participant in each network, and will leverage our experiences in making future allocation decisions. We expect that our depth of knowledge in the nuances of each network will provide a sustainable, differentiated advantage as investors. And it goes without saying that doing this at scale requires significant operating infrastructure, relationships, and human capital. Sub-scale funds will not be able to do this effectively.

Today I also published an article about our EOS Block Producer Voting Criteria on Forbes. You can read that article here.